


Skipping Stones

by oldmythologies



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Shiro (Voltron) Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, hanakotoba, keith is so good
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-01
Updated: 2018-08-01
Packaged: 2019-06-20 00:07:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15521724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oldmythologies/pseuds/oldmythologies
Summary: wil·low /ˈwilō/ noun1. recovery, hope// Written for the Hanakotoba Zine, collab with artists @L_Strikes_art and @velowsa on twitter //





	Skipping Stones

**Author's Note:**

> So excited to finally share this <3 Link to art at the end!

Shiro snores like an engine. 

He didn’t snore, before. Keith remembers how Shiro slept, before. He’d fall asleep on top of piles of books, on the floor of Keith’s dorm, sitting up in class. It was kind of a superpower, how comfortable Shiro was sleeping. Shiro was like a switch; awake or asleep, nothing in between. When he woke up, disgustingly early, he was immediately ready to go. When he went to bed, he was out the second his head hit the pillow. He didn’t get drowsy, he didn’t doze off, and he didn’t wake up slowly. Back then, his airway had been clear, formed by the same sculptor who had carved the Golden Ratio into each of his features.

Now, he snores.

The first time Shiro had been comfortable enough to sleep in front of Keith, Shiro had been half asleep for days. Something had broken the easy light switch and now, he was always hovering somewhere between off and on. They had been watching some dumb, shitty movie, when Keith felt Shiro slump next to him; he all but held his breath. The snoring had shocked Keith, but he understood.

In the soft glow of the stars, Keith could trace Shiro’s scar, feel where it cut into his bone, like someone had taken a hammer to the sculptor’s perfect work, chipping away the parts that helped Shiro breathe. The scar had gone dark, a reflection of the people who had created it and the time Shiro spent with them. Shiro would lean into Keith’s hands, relish the touch, but never meet his eyes. He’d bite down his cheeks and blink as Keith laid kisses on his nose, the shadow and light alike.

In the dark of midnight, Keith could sense sleep cracking and the nightmare breaking through. When Shiro went stiff, his entire body trembling under the effort of staying still, Keith wanted to deny the terrors, wanted to bury Shiro’s head in his arms and force the bad out. Since Keith couldn’t do that, he just bit on his lip until he tasted copper.

Sleep was easy for Shiro, before. A lot of things were easier back then. Breathing, thinking, closing his eyes. When Shiro froze in training, Keith took notice. Everything used to be easier.

Sleeping was easier.

Shiro’s nightmares are silent. Sometimes, that’s the most terrifying part. Keith doesn’t wake up with the sharp feeling that he should because Shiro doesn’t shout. He doesn’t lash out. He doesn’t even move. The only thing that wakes Keith up is the way he breathes.

Even now, Keith dreads the breaking point, where Shiro loses himself in a nightmare and Keith can’t wake up to pull him out.

The nightmares are terrifying. 

First, the rhythm of Shiro’s snoring splinters. The soft walking tempo hitches for a breath, starts back up at forte, before the sudden cut off, and then tacet, silence. If Keith’s lucky, he wakes up right then and cards his fingers through Shiro’s sweaty hair, whispering little bits of nothing into Shiro’s deaf ears. 

Keith tells Shiro about their Smirnoff nights, getting drunk for the first time and accidentally saying things that both of them pretended to forget in the morning, of that first sunrise after finding Shiro again, about bringing him home and helping him become human again, about the smile Shiro got when he talked about the constellations, about the way he speaks, with such passion and intent that sometimes, he made Keith forget to breathe. He talks about the smell of his dorm, the smell of the castle, what the garrison uniforms felt like and describes the color of sunrise in perfect detail, about that first ray of pink light that Shiro loved.

When Keith runs out of words to say, he hums the songs they listened to when they were young. He’s forgotten the words, but it’s all white noise to Shiro, and that’s all that matters.

He holds Shiro until he falls back asleep. The music starts back up a tempo as Shiro starts to snore again.

On the bad nights, Shiro arches out of Keith’s warm arms. On those nights, singing doesn’t work and touching him is a bad idea. 

Keith is always careful to make noise as he moves, but not too much. The tightrope gets difficult to walk when it’s the middle of the night and sleep still has its claws in Keith. He can’t be silent, because the things that lurk in the dark are silent, and he can’t be loud because the monsters are loud when they come out of hiding. Keith hates that he can’t do anything better than _not make it worse_. If he could say more, if he could make Shiro feel safe, nights would be better.

Tonight, it’s bad. 

Shiro’s features twist as something unseen pulls him in on himself. Sweat builds on his brow little by little, the effort of silence breaking out onto his skin. His eyelashes flutter, fighting back against the demons on the other side of his lids.

Keith can do nothing but watch the Altean blue light get stuck in his scar, stark lines across his face where light and shadow are afraid to meet. Keith wants to raise the lights to full, to send the shadows back to the hell they came from, but it doesn’t work like that. These shadows are not the absence of light; they’re something dark, a rift in Shiro’s skin that the flip of a switch can’t fix.

Shiro goes so far as to whimper before biting down on his own lip. His silence is important to him, even in his sleep.  _ Was it something Shiro learned in captivity?  _ The implication chills Keith to the bottom of his stomach.

Keith knows not to wake Shiro unless he has to. It’s good when Shiro can wake up on his own, can find tethers and climb up that rope under his own strength; it’s best when he goes back to sleep without needing to wake up.

Keith pulls his knees to his chest as he watches. If minds were easy, he could snap his fingers and tell Shiro that he was safe, that he would be safe as long as Keith was around to protect him. Even the lights know when it gets bad, and they raise behind Keith, a warm yellow that speaks of dawn.

Shiro groans and twitches, teeth tightening on his lip.

His twitches turn to thrashes and soon he’s striking out. Keith knows he has to stay out of the way; he knows that if Shiro so much as scratched Keith, Shiro would never forgive himself. Instead, Keith had to live with the guilt that Shiro was suffering and Keith could do nothing to stop it.

Shiro’s struggling grows focused as he curls around his arm. At first, Keith can’t tell what he’s doing, arms crossed over his chest. His eyes beat behind his lids, searching for something that Keith knows isn’t good. Then, Shiro’s neck strains and Keith can finally see Shiro’s fingers.

His nails dig into the knotted flesh above his prosthetic, scratching the seam over and over, looking for flesh and only finding metal. Keith’s eyes widen as he watches skin raise and go red, Shiro’s nails threatening to break through.

Keith drops his knees and leans forward. Shiro jumps at his first word.

“Shiro?”

Shiro’s eyes snap open, glazed over, choking on a gasp. Shiro’s blind; he’s still chasing ghosts and shadows, fighting them in his mind and with the set of his jaw. When he releases his lip, Keith can see the bitemarks in his lip. Keith can’t touch Shiro, not yet. He’s not coherent enough to catch the difference between the touch meant to harm and the touch meant to heal, not when his body is more scar than skin. It’s hard for Keith to say what he needs to, but for Shiro, he tries.

Keith has never been good at empty words, but these words aren’t empty. They mean nothing but with them they carry every little thing that Keith can’t bring himself to say when Shiro’s awake. He tells Shiro about the things that are too much to talk about in the light of day, about his loneliness and his love, about how the stars blink Shiro’s name in Morse code and how Keith has always sensed Shiro’s smile reflected in the moon and water and the warm desert breeze, about their time as two little people without suspicions, and word by word, Shiro’s breathing falls along with Keith’s.

“Can you hear me?” he tries again. Shiro’s looks over the points of light in the room, flickering between each one as they hum for him, before he settles on Keith. He searches Keith’s eyes, taking in every speck, before he stares back at the ceiling with a swallow.

Shiro’s eyes close. “Yeah,” his voice cracks, the low whisper breaking whatever ounce of control he has left. 

The second he gets the confirmation, Keith pulls Shiro into the hollow of his throat, tracing up and down the muscles of Shiro’s back, still trembling in waves of tension. He has to force his fingers not to stutter on the scars, to move in even, easy strokes; to remind Shiro that every single part of him is okay, and right here.

Keith speaks into the heavy silence. “You want to talk about—”

“I’m sorry,” Shiro cuts him off.

The words hit Keith’s skin and he blinks down at Shiro’s hidden head. “What?”

Shiro’s breath runs along Keith’s skin. “I’m sorry you have to deal with this.” 

Shiro’s short laugh lacks humor, a dry sound that hides the way he wants to cough on his own words. Keith was used to his coping mechanisms and saw right through it, arms tightening around Shiro’s back.

“You’re not allowed to apologize,” Keith burdens each syllable with intent. He waits for a response, but Shiro stays silent, wrapping the fingers of his left hand in the fabric of Keith’s shirt, breathing. “You know that none of it is your fault, right?”

There’s a beat before Shiro nods. It’s odd for Keith, to pick out a lie in a simple nod.

“You need to say it for me,” Keith waits, thumb running circles into Shiro’s shoulder.

“I can’t.” Shiro tries to hide the words in Keith’s skin, and Keith can barely make out Shiro’s whisper above the hum of the engines and his own heartbeat. “I’m broken.”

Keith’s hand comes up to hold the back of Shiro’s head, fingers lacing through the sticky hair.

“You’re not broken.” He tries to bite down the anger. His eyes sting.

Shiro shifts back, turning so that Keith can just barely make out the reflection of light in the wetness of his eyes. 

He spits out the words, tasting them on his tongue.

“I can’t get the image of Sendak out of my head.  _ Broken _ and  _ reformed _ .” 

Keith cups the line of Shiro’s jaw, tilting his face until their eyes meet. Shiro’s eyes are red and he’s biting the inside of his cheek. Keith traces his scar, his eyebrows, his lips, before shifting down, pressing his forehead to Shiro’s, letting their noses brush. Keith’s hands find Shiro’s temple, pressing soothing circles into his head. 

Keith doesn’t know what to do; doesn’t know how to fix it. There is no switch, no secret to healing word that’s stronger than time. The red creeping into Shiro’s eyes, the tremble of his arms, they unfurl something that Keith had forgotten in his need to be okay. Memories spill out with his breath.

“When I was a kid, one of my foster homes was right on this tiny lake. There was this willow tree right on the shore.” The words hover only in the space between them. Keith watches Shiro’s face start to relax under his ministrations, irises opening up to focus on Keith’s face. he doesn’t often to get to hear Keith talk, and when he does, he can’t help but stare. “That tree went through hell. I was only there for one winter, but entire branches and roots split off in the floods, you’d see it get pulled around in the wind like thousands of ghosts were trying to pull it apart. I think it died at least twice that winter. In spring, it was green again, alive. Not exactly the same, but there were new branches and it bloomed all yellow. I remember skipping stones under it.” 

Keith smiles. “It was nice.”

Shiro’s smile is small when Keith catches his gaze again, gray and blue and violet all at once in the dim light. The nightmare still hasn’t left, but when Keith looks in Shiro’s eyes, he doesn’t see the ache of fear. In the dying silver he can see a warm spring sun, yellow blossoms in a still lake, a nap against the worn bark of an old, tired willow.

“Are you calling me a tree?” Shiro lets himself relax in against Keith’s hands. He curls back into Keith’s arms, not because of the fear of what lurks in the dark, but because of the safety where he is. If Shiro was a cat, he’d be purring; instead, he just hums, soft.

Keith shakes his head and presses a soft kiss to Shiro’s nose. Shiro almost sneezes, shaking his head and twitching his nose, puffing out the sneeze. Keith laughs. “I’m saying that you’re not broken. You’re going to grow back and I’ll be there when it happens.”

Shiro shifts around in Keith’s arms. “And you’re going to skip stones under my tree branches.” The fingers in Keith’s shirt tightens. Shiro’s grasping at the rope Keith has thrown him and dragging himself out of the darkness towards the warm hope and the dappled light of sunrise. Keith is all too happy to keep going.

“We’re going to skip stones together.”

Shiro lets the silence grow heavy. “You know I’m not a tree.” Keith can hear the swallowed love behind his words.

“I was trying to make a metaphor about recovery and whatever.” Keith smiles and lets his eyes fall closed.

“It was a very good metaphor.” Shiro nuzzles in further.

“You’re not allowed to apologize for letting me help.”

Shiro hums. “I’m trying.”

“That’s all you need to do.”

Their voices drift off, responses getting shorter and mumbled hums growing more common. When Keith falls back asleep, he dreams of a spring breeze ruffling the gentle flow of the lake, the wind in the willow brushing the leaves together, and the sun hanging low in the sky. Shiro stands with his feet cooled in the lake. Keith watches the light shining through the branches play in the water. Shiro laughs as his stone skips, one, two, three, four times before slipping under the water. Keith breathes in the summer air. Shiro laughs, and the smell of heat, humidity, of distant flowers in bloom is carried in the water’s breath. It feels like home.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Lightning's piece   
>  [Velowsa's piece](https://twitter.com/velowsa/status/1024656195909378049)
> 
> Hanakotoba holds my heart and soul, y'all. Working on her with these amazing people literally changed my life. Hope you enjoyed, and please scream with me online.
> 
> twitter [@oldmythos](https://twitter.com/oldmythos)
> 
> tumblr [@oldmythos](http://oldmythos.tumblr.com)


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